Sissela Bok: What Does She Do Till Derek Comes Home?

Until the winter sky begins to darken, Sissela Bok, the wife of the President of Harvard University, the mother of three children, the daughter of Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Mrydal, is alone in a small garret on the top floor of her Cambridge house. She has more than a room of her own up there; she has a whole land to herself where she can dream and reminisce, a land no foreigner can invade.

Sissela Bok is writing her first book, a study of medical ethics. She spends eight hours a day writing in her room--starting early in the morning, after jogging, and ending when her children return from school in the afternoon. She does on her three children, and when they return, she will often take them out back for a game of soccer on the palatial grounds of the house Harvard has given her husband. But during the day, with the house to herself, she writes.

Sitting upright in a large wooden chair, she can see the vegetable garden sprawled three stories below her. When she reaches a stand-still in her writing, she will sometimes ponder the remains of life in the garden--or she will turn from the window and pace slowly around the large room. But she is a disciplined woman who leads a supremely organized life, and she does not spend much time pacing and gazing, even when afflicted with writers block. She will simply walk toward a little doorway in the far corner, pass through a tiny bathroom, and emerge in her second writing room. In that room, another desk is cluttered with another set of papers. This is the room where Sissela Bok is writing a book about lying and deception. When she tires of medical ethics, she will write about dishonesty; when she tires of dishonesty, it is back through the bathroom and into the world of euthanasia, abortion and other medical issues.

Sissela does not want any material treasures to remind her of her childhood in Sweden, so the garret contains nothing Swedish except her own language hidden in the bookshelf. Others bring in any Swedish souvenirs the house may harbor. Her parents often bring her son gifts from their travels; orange blue painted wooden horses from Sweden line the mantel in his room. "Like the ones I had when I was little," she says. In the library downstairs there is a white marble bust of Sissela, sculpted when she was 11. Her parents wanted to give work to one of the refugees in Sweden, so Sissela sat once a week for months playing solitaire, while the refugee artist ignored the child and chiseled out her image in marble. "My husband wanted this copy of it brought over," she explains.

Although Sissela doesn't want to bring any part of Sweden to America, she is not at home here. Sometimes she comes down from her garret and dresses up in pastel skirts with matching jackets and white patent leather shoes and confronts these Americans who made demands on her as the wife of the President, or as a serious academic.

Like a practice teacher she is enthusiastic but reserved, encouraging but not confident, always in fear of doing something wrong. Addressing a high-powered Kennedy School class, she smiles while discoursing on lying and deception, but her face wrinkles up with anxiety when she listens to students' questions.

At formal parties where she must play first lady, Harvard regulars say she's at a disadvantage because her husband knows everyone or has been briefed on the guests, while she must be a charming hostess to many people she's never met. One frequent reception guest feels "she handles these people very well. She's simply a marvelous hostess." To others however Sissela is not so convincingly relaxed. "She's sort of like a shy, scared little bird about to be crushed by a falling ceiling or a rock," says one Harvard administrator.

Sissela is not a stranger to the limelight; from childhood on she's never known a day of anonymity. Yet she is not herself among a group of faceless cocktail conversationalists. She trys hard and bears through it all, joining intellectual discussions whenever possible.

Despite the demands upon Sissela Bok for public appearances, it is not very easy to get to talk to her. After Sissela agreed to let a Crimson reporter spend time with her at home, at parties and at meetings, her husband and others persuaded her against it. "Please talk to Deane Lord, she can explain it better," Sissela finally told the Crimson reporter.

***

Deane Lord, director of the Harvard News Office, charged around her office in a huge raincoat, giving orders to nervous underlings, attempting to look very important before she settled her huge presence into her desk chair. She announced quite firmly that Sissela did not want the family in the article. Derek Bok had explained, regretfully, that the family already lives in a fishbowl.

"This is a first on Sissela," Lord said. "She doesn't want the full profile; what she sees this as is a presentation of her work to the community." The decision was made that Sissela would spend an hour talking solely about her work and her views on child raising. No family related questions were to be discussed. Lord argued a strong case for focusing the article on Sissela's work, "She's more of an impressive scholar than he is," Lord proclaimed finally.

The hour interview with Sissela went on guardedly under the scrutinizing eye of Deane Lord. Any remarks related to the family were checked. Sissela was even cautious about discussing her own academic theories. When asked what specific limitations she would place on fetal research, for example, she replied with a little laugh, "Oh, this is so complicated, maybe its better you know if you call me at home, I could go over my papers and things like that." Her articles are very categorical. Her theories are in outline form. She is very organized. As a guest lecturer on lying and deception in a Kennedy School seminar, she outlined three reasons why people feel it is safe to lie. When the lecture and discussion were over these three criteria were all that many of the students had bothered writing down.

Sissela serves on a hospital committee on human experimentation and is regularly consulted by doctors both as a committee members and as a medical ethics specialist. But she doesn't feel people respect her opinion. She asked repeatedly to have quotes read back to her before they were printed "because otherwise, you know, doctors will read these things and say, 'My God, now what's she saying?' Then it turns out its not even something I did mean."

She fears being wrong in making intelligent decisions in her field so she avoids making them. She would not discuss the Edelin case, or the case of Karen Quinlan, the comatose woman in New Jersey, because they were still in the courts. When pressed on the Quinlan case she said, "I don't want to talk about that case, I really don't because, as I say, it is still in the court and its very, very hard for all the people involved. So I'd prefer not to."

At Harvard parties, many guests end up discussing controversial issues and court cases involving medical ethics with Sissela. She presents the whole situation but never ventures an opinion on which way the decision should go. A trustee of the hospital Sissela works at explained, "She was very interesting to talk to on the Quinlan case." But even there she did not advocate a particular solution.

In spite of the complicated social problems she encounters in her work, she persists in offering idealistic solutions. She maintains that knowledge about abortions is becoming more widespread so that problems of late abortions will diminish. And she advocates decreasing machine and drug care for terminal patients and increasing human care, despite her knowledge that medical personnel and families of dying patients feel extremely uncomfortable with them and avoid them when the patient is close to death.

Yet her academic pursuits are the main topic of her conversations with a variety of regular guests at Harvard functions. They find her "extremely engaging" and likable, as one of them says. She is good at putting people at ease, but one observer sees "a veneer--she tries to appear calm but there is no inner peace."

"Her manner is more formal than is usual," for people in Harvard circles, the wife of a Harvard administrator says. "Perhaps it is because of her European upbringing." Sissela, too, believes her foreign background explains part of why she does not act like everyone else.

Her foreign feelings are most strongly apparent in her failure to adopt the American woman's increasing awareness of sexism, Sissela does not consider Harvard a male dominated environment; nor does she feel that being a women here has led to any special problems. "That may be something that I never really worried too much about. But that may also be because I did grow up in another country and it never occurred to me to worry about whether I was a woman or a man. That was really not something and it never occurred to me to worry about whether other people worried about that."

Sissela questions herself at times when many women would quickly seize the chance to charge sexism. In a situation where she feels her opinion is not being taken seriously, she explains with a small laugh, "The fact that I am a woman would not occur to me as the first possibility. I'd be much more worried had I done my homework, had I really prepared for this, am I being silly? But am I a woman? That would not come in as a very early question."

But Sissela does not feel at home in Europe, either. She left Sweden when she was twelve, and when she returns now it is not to her homeland. She loves to go back there and makes the trip about every three years. It's nostalgic then, journeying back to the land of her tomboy youth, where they didn't let the girls play soccer, as her daughters do here; where she avoided dance classes and thrilled in climbing trees. "I love to hear the people speaking my language. It's nice to go into a bookstore and see that all the books are in Swedish."

She has no ties to any country, she's never lived in one for long enough. She holds tightly to her children, stopping her writing when they come home to be with them. She is a very attentive mother despite her own independent childhood, filled with memories of famous important parents always leaving or on their way back. "When my parents were in India, they used to send us tapes, and they were so much nicer than letters."

And when the children leave for school she starts up the winding wooden stairway toward her garret and no one follows.